Learned Optimism
Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enhances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an I-give-up habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier. With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical--and valuable for every phase of life. --Publisher.
Stats for nerds
56recommend
108mentions
74people
2007–2025years
76% recommend22% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend Martin Seligman. I've read some of Kahneman's academic work. Martin Seligman changed my life with Learned Optimism.
- > Be resilient. Be able to bounce back from pain or discomfort.
That's kinda like saying "be rich". Resilience takes a lot of time and effort, and only really builds after going through adversity, with healing and processing on the other side.
Perhaps better advice: be vulnerable, and prepared to deal with some pain and discomfort as a result. Identify people in your life who can help support you through painful interactions or events along the way. Learn strategies for framing and processing adversity through books like Learned Optimism (the ABCDE model) or "The Work".
I'm far from perfect, but this helped me build resilience to handle times when I "put myself out there" and it didn't work out.
- It’s called learned helplessness and is a good indicator for pessimism. There is a book I enjoyed that discusses the issue in depth, called: Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman. The second half of the book is about how to become less of a pessimist, by addressing learned helplessness.
- Learned Optimism has a similar style of explaining the author's work over many years in an accessible manner
- My perspective on this is one of a person who underwent years of complex trauma in childhood and my stuck-ness was a series of overly sensitive protective mechanisms that had been built up by the experience.
“The illusion of being stuck” also sounds a lot like “Learned Helplessness”, which is a maladaptive conditioning of the brain to strongly believe that not doing something is the best option because doing something won’t make a difference anyway, despite this not being true at all. Like drowning in two feet of water because it didn’t occur to the person to just stand up.
The reason I’m pointing at trauma is that we all come from a wide spectrum of experiences, which result in a wide spectrum of stuckness (or lack thereof).
The book “Learned Optimism” (written by Martin Seligman, one of the original researchers who discovered the learned helplessness phenomenon) first describes how animals (not just humans) arrive in these maladaptive states, and then provides worksheets to help people who are currently deeply biased towards a pessimistic world view learn techniques to reframe and ultimately rewire these biases, and I can attest to the life changing improvements this kind of work can bring without my brain falling out.
More broadly, it’s worth considering the fact that we’re all running firmware that evolved during a very different era of human existence, and is often poorly tuned for modern reality.
Using what we know about the brain and how it is conditioned to adapt ourselves to modern situations seems pretty critical.
> I'm not convinced that this is generally a good idea. It makes a person unmoored and open to anything ("so open minded that your brains fall out"). It's also often amoral. The only metric that's maximised is utility regardless of other more subtle consequences.
This seems like a pretty major jump to a conclusion that would require far more to back it up.
I don’t think this is about mucking with firmware as much as it is about correcting model weights. Our firmware seems to be what it is. Our environment and conditioning is what embeds certain biases and resulting behaviors.
Human experience is certainly more complex than just a few hacks, but I don’t think that discounts the value that certain kinds of exercises can bring.
We’re continually working against our default modes of operation when we adhere to principles of rational thought and logic. Emotional responses like anger discard these higher modes of thinking. I see these “hacks” as something similar: methods of helping us move beyond the less adaptive parts of our brains based on a growing understanding of the world around us.
- The book "Learned Optimism" was a life changing read for me coming from this kind of background. It includes exercises that start to rewire your brain. Highly recommended.
